Russell M Davies: History will remember Samuel Pepys' blog

This article was taken from the May 2012 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
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Nine years ago -- before ­YouTube, before Facebook, before Twitter, before it was easy -- Phil
Gyford started putting Samuel
Pepys' diary online. More precisely, he put the entry for
January 1, 1660, up on January 1, 2003, and he's been updating it
ever since. Pepys wrote his last diary entry on May 31, 1669, so
Phil will do the last update on May 31. And then have a party.

From the start it was clear that Pepysdiary.com meant something.
Clay Shirky said in 2003, talking about the emergence of blogs:
"The vertigo moment for me was when Phil Gyford launched the Pepys
weblog... What that said to me was: Phil was asserting, and I now
believe, that weblogs will be around for at least ten years,
because that's how long Pepys kept a diary. And that was this
moment of projecting into the future: this is now infrastructure we
can take for granted." In some worlds ten years isn't very long:
it's not if you're digging an undersea tunnel or discovering a cure
for disease. But in the busy, silly world of early 21st-century
media, making a ten-year assertion was a big deal -- something akin
to the Clock of the Long
Now.

Now, in the world of Twitter and Instagram, it looks even more
quixotically patient and focused. And that's why the completion of
Pepysdiary.com should be celebrated -- it teaches us that the
internet has power over other dimensions than the Social Graph and
the Real-Time Web, that web success can be built with things other
than venture cash, spammy PR and rapid scaling. Pepysdiary.com has
a community because people found it, hung around and started
contributing. And it isn't about making money -- Phil does it for
nothing, pouring in hours of work every week, out of love,
dedication and, I suspect, a cussed determination to see something
through. Crucially, it's not that modern web "for nothing", which
means "no monetisation model now, but we'll build a billion users
and work it out later". This is the non-commercial, hobbyist web
that destroyed so many business models back then and which no one
talks about any more.

But it's not like Phil is some sort of early 2000s Luddite,
hanging on to an idea of a handmade web. He's not afraid to enhance
things when appropriate technologies come along. It's become the
definitive Pepys resource on the web, incorporating maps,
annotations and community, everything linked in just the way the
web does best. The Twitter account @samuelpepys has found the
diaries a new audience -- over 25,000 followers -- and attracts
­frequent retweets from William ­Gibson, the
ultimate demonstration of relevance and futurity.

I asked Shirky what he thinks about Pepysdiary.com in 2012. How
does it feel now? "It feels like 2003, the year of Friendster, when
everything social seemed new, but now seems as quaint as a sepia
photograph. Most of all, it is obvious that Phil was right, and
that his understanding of how important weblogs would become wasn't
just spot on, but he also imagined, again ahead of us all, that
there would come a day where that feeling of newness would end,
that Samuel Pepys would tire of writing a diary the second time
around too." Maybe that's the real lesson of ­Pepysdiary.com. We'll
only really understand what we're doing when it stops feeling new,
when we have a sense of history about what we're making.

Russell M Davies is a contributing editor at wired and an
occasional blogger at russelldavies.com